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Thanks,
Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor
CEOCFOMagazine
352.431.3400
lynn.fosse@CEOCFOmagazine.com
www.ceocfointerviews.com
Please review the contact info below:
Pamela Szabo
Founder + CTO
Stone Bond Technologies
1021 Main Street
Suite 1550
Houston, TX – 77002
713-622-8798
www.stonebond.com
Interview conducted by:
Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor
CEOCFO Magazine
(Please insert narrative bio and corporate profile. If info already here you
may replace if you wish)
BIO:
Ms. Szabo is the primary architect of Enterprise Enabler. She has spent the
majority of her career working with information technology, with experience
ranging from technical programming, computer graphics, robotics, analysis, and
design, through project management as well as the "softer" aspects of
implementation work, including business process re-engineering and change
management. As a result of several years focused study of integration
requirements of information requirements of information systems for the energy
industry, she became interested in making integration easily available to
scientist, engineers, and data analysts without being dependent on a
programmer. Her overall concept, architecture and philosophy have become
Enterprise Enabler. Ms. Szabo holds a BS, summa cum laude, in Computer
Science from the University of Houston.
AboutStone Bond Technologies:
Business and government face similar challenges with data complexity and
timely availability including:
Constant business change driving rapid access to data.
Exploding volumes and complexity of data that increase risk and reduce
business agility.
Financial constraints necessitating more cost-effective IT solutions and a faster
time-to-value for the investments already made.
Our solution, Enterprise Enabler™, the industry’s leading comprehensive multiapplication integration solution for enterprise data integration and federation,
gives you real-time availability of information when and where it is needed. We
combine this with the business logic driving the data movement, so that you can
gain control of your business data
The vision behind the creation of Enterprise Enabler has been to make data
available and valuable to anyone. The motto of our development team has been The economy of movement conceals the complexity of what is being executed.
The result has been a complex solution with a very easy to use interface making
data valuable to the business with an exceptionally fast time-to-value. For Stone
Bond, this is a journey, not a destination.
Please ‘check’ any highlighted words or phrases listed as inaudible; we were
unable to understand these words or phrases.
CEOCFO: Ms, Szabo, what is the concept behind Stone Bond
Technologies?
Ms. Szabo: The concept is to INAUDIBLE all of the activities of getting data,
moving throughout the enterprise and however the data needs to be. We cover
the space of a classic enterprise middleware, but we have the full scope of
middleware in a single environment. Most middlewares require one of their
products to another, to another, to another and cobble them all together to get a
complete INAUDIBLE one environment, and you can create all kinds of
integration in a fraction of the time of doing it with any other INAUDIBLE.
CEOCFO: What are you able to tell us about the technology that allows you
to do what others cannot or do not?
Ms. Szabo: I think the answer is that instead of going through all of the
machinations of building integration, moving data from here, you are able to do
that and set it up in minutes instead of weeks. The reason is that it is a single,
cohesive solution that you are just configuring instead of writing a ton of scripting
or programming or anything like that.
CEOCFO: When you are speaking with potential customers, do they
understand the difference easily or is it more likely they just care about the
end result?
Ms. Szabo: These days, people are really interested in the agility that you can
get from being able to build integration quickly, modify it as you need and allow
the enterprise to change directions quickly, whereas otherwise you cannot. The
people who we talk to either get in when they see it or we are talking to the
wrong people who do not understand what the problem is that we are solving. In
fact, we have had trouble over our long history because we have been around for
12 years, and this has not been something that people have thought about
because it turns out that it is a kind of a disruptive approach. We have had in the
last maybe three years, the analysts have come up with a term for one of the key
things that is underlying what we do. That is data virtualization, and it is not the
same thing as virtualizing data where you take your data and put it in the clouds,
for example. It is taking the data live from the end points and pulling them all
together live and delivering the data wherever it is needed, when it is needed on
demand. That is a concept that has been a core to our product from the
beginning, but it is only now that people are beginning to understand that you
really need to be able to move data live, not put it in another database just so you
can pull it back out again to make sense. That is largely what happens in
enterprises today.
CEOCFO: Are there particular industries of focus for you, types of
companies or sizes of companies?
Ms. Szabo: We are mostly large companies, Fortune 500. We have a number of
smaller companies. One of the interesting things about our technology is that it
does not just scale up, but it scales down because it is all a single product and
you just grow things by the figure. We started out in the oil industry, which I think
is the reason we had a different perspective on integration than people who start
in a finance or accounting kind of world. We are in many different industries. We
are in utilities, oil and gas, care and INAUDIBLE.
CEOCFO: How do you know that you will be able to integrate any new
technology or system that comes along? What is the key to accepting
anything and everything into your grand plan?
Mr. Szabo: It really boils down to the core architecture that we have. We have
everything so modular that if we come across an endpoint of data either
delivering it, packaging it as a standard or all these new standards and web
services and INAUDIBLE and so forth, that is just a small layer that needs to be
put in for a particular end point. We have a totally different technology than other
middlewares do for connectivity. We have connectivity INAUDIBLE. People call
them connectors or adapters, but these are very intelligent app coms that on one
hand know intimately how to communicate with whatever the endpoint is. On the
other end of it, they know how to take orders from and communicate to the
transformation engine that is pulling all the data together. You have this live
orchestration happening with all kinds of different types of data sources live with
these app coms knowing how to interact with the data as it flows through. We
have a different connectivity, and we have never met an end point we could not
connect to. We have connected to electronic instruments, databases, data
warehouses, big data, and ERP systems like SAP and all the web services and
so forth.
CEOCFO: Tell us about implementation. What is involved?
Ms. Szabo: Of course it depends on the size of the project, but since it is a
single, we call it an IDE, which is an Integrated Development Environment. A
person can sit down at the product, point to the sources that they are interested
in, and select the data INAUDIBLE select from. They then bring it together, show
how the data is all related and then package it however you want to with
whatever business logic, which is also drag and drop technology. Testing of
course is also happening at the same time. We are testing against live endpoints
instead of taking everything to a test separate test environment and going back
and forth.
CEOCFO: What is your revenue model?
Mr. Szabo: We sell perpetual licenses, or we can sell it as a service and then
there is a manual maintenance stream. With the service model, that is usually
included. We do some services mostly just training and bringing the teams up to
speed on the various options for architectures and INAUDIBLE when you get into
the nitty gritty, heavy duty performance, tuning and things like that. We do some
services, but our revenue is primarily around the product itself.
CEOCFO: How do you reach out to prospective customers? If someone is
looking, how will they know to search for Stone Bond?
Ms. Szabo: We are doing many different things. We have actually been doing a
fair amount of online marketing with social media and so forth, and that is kind of
a fun thing that we are finding is working very well for us. We are well covered by
the analysts Gartner and Forrester, and we occasionally go to conferences and
promote ourselves there. It is mostly our internal efforts on getting the word out to
big corporations.
CEOCFO: What have you learned as the product has been available? What
has changed, if anything, over time in the concept and the implementation?
Ms. Szabo: The most amazing thing is that we have learned that it lasts through
any changes that have happened. We originally put the product out in 2004 or
2005, and we easily upgraded when new underlying technology came along. We
have been able to keep up with every one of the new trends like big data and the
web services moving to rest and so forth without missing a beat. That has been
interesting about it. The other thing that is interesting is that nobody else is doing
it this way. I actually have a theory on it and that is that there are two classes,
grossly speaking, of integration product. There are the point integrations that are
for a particular purpose and then there is the middleware. The middleware is
typically IBM, Informatica and Oracle. Those are the big ones that we go up
against a lot, and we win technically every time. What has happened is that each
of these different models of integration have happened over time. There is a bulk
load and then there is more transaction oriented, more real-time data, web
services and so forth. What has happened with the enterprise product companies
like IBM and such is that rather than build an extension to a product that they
have already, they go out and buy another company. When they buy another
company, that is another product. They then end up with 50 different products,
which cover the full suite of integration, but they cannot share any information
back and forth across them. You have to learn a new product for each of those
different modes. With ours, you are building the integration logic and then you
are just deploying it in any of those loads at all. I think that people who were
thinking about integration are always thinking about solving a very specific type
of solution. Today everything is web services or INAUDIBLE focused. When you
design something if you are thinking that narrowly, it becomes very difficult to
expand it to be anything more than that. To do anything else, you have to either
buy another product and kind of cobble them together or you have to go back
and redesign deep down from your product.
CEOCFO: It seems so simple that people might just overlook that!
Ms. Szabo: I think that what we benefited from really was that I was thinking
about a very complex set of problems that are inherent to the downstream
petroleum industry. The have very complex applications that need data, so they
can run these complex simulations and everything. They need data from the
market, the refinery, prices and volumes, and all these come from totally different
applications. This is a problem I had been struggling with for 10 years maybe
before we decided to go INAUDIBLE to build the product. I think it is a different
perspective on what the problem is that allowed us to come up with it. Today, if
any big company or not so big company is struggling with the problem of
integration and if you just need a piece of information to get it to them and get it
on a list four months down the road to be able to find out a particular kind of
information that they want to start and analyze, it is a huge impediment to the
operation of the company. If you cannot find out information quickly and if it takes
highly trained, very expensive teams of people months to make one change, you
are not agile. Everything is about agility. The agile companies are the ones that
are going to win. It is a competitive advantage, and that is what our customers
see INAUDIBLE. They can shed all of these resources that require hundreds of
hours of training before they can write a little script to do a small thing. You can
take much more general knowledge programmers and even database analysts
and build very sophisticated infrastructure.
CEOCFO: What might be different a year or two down to road for Stone
Bond Technologies?
Ms. Szabo: We are on a roll now, so I think there are going to be many things
different. The growth of acceptance and sales of the product show that it is a
good thing it is an off the shelf product because we do not have to customize for
anybody. We would be having trouble keeping up. With the product itself, we
have many exciting things that we are working on with it. For example. If you
have heard of master data management, what our product does is a framework
that one could call master data management, but we need to add a few
management screens to it and so forth to leverage that aspect of it. If you think
about a big company, if you were able to traverse this metadata stack that we
have, you could actually make a screen that showed all of the data throughout
the company, the flow that it goes through and how fast it is moving now, and
you could have a very nice video game type thing. There is no way you could do
that now in most companies because they do not have the data that just actually
flows straight through where it needs to be. It stops at many places along the
way, sits there, rests a little bit and has a drink of water.
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